Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Unless I swung left instead, and rammed the Vyper pacing me. That would be pretty much suicidal, of course – but ‘pretty much’ isn’t the same as ‘definitely,’ and staying where I was certainly didn’t look like an option. In situations like this, I’ve found, it’s better simply to act before your self-preservation instincts kick in, rather than think about what you’re about to do long enough to have to argue with your subconscious, so I took a firmer grip on the control column, before glancing across at the Vyper preparatory to yanking it hard over.

And found myself looking straight into the pilot’s eyes. For a timeless second our gazes locked, then I completed the movement I’d begun, swerving the air car right at the eldar flyer a handful of metres away, and bracing myself for the impact.

Which never came. The Vyper swung smoothly out of my path, maintaining the separation between us almost to the millimetre. Then all three of them tilted their noses skyward, and soared upwards, vanishing from view within moments, lost among the myriad of motes dancing in the sky around the spire.

‘Taupe leader, we have a visual, and are in pursuit,’ a fresh voice crackled in my vox, and the air shook around me with a thunder of afterburners. The Lightnings ripped through the sky, their distinctive swept-forward wings making them stand out vividly against the weather-ravaged ’crete of the spire’s outer cladding – then they were past and away, creating more of a flurry in the local traffic patterns than the eldar ever managed. A second later the shock wave of their passing hit, leaving my damaged air car bobbing like a cork in a wastefall.

Straightening up and steadying my flight path took up most of my attention for a moment or two, and by the time I had any to spare for my surroundings again I’d already acquired new, and far more welcome, company. A couple of armed grav-speeders, in the same gubernatorial livery as what was left of the car I was piloting, were pacing me. My vox-bead crackled again.

‘Governor Fulcher’s compliments, commissar. We’ve been sent to escort you in.’

‘Much obliged,’ I said, and waved to them with all the insouciance I could muster. ‘I think I’ve had enough sightseeing for one day.’

Thirteen

I was greeted on my arrival by Fulcher himself, accompanied, as befitted his status, by a platoon of flunkies and hangers-on.110 The grav-speeders had guided me to a small hangar in the outer wall of the spire, no more than a couple of hundred metres below the summit. I put the air car down with an almost overwhelming sense of relief as the outer doors began to grind closed behind us, settling it in the middle of a somewhat scuffed mosaic, in which the Imperial aquila and the Fulcher family crest had been jammed together to the aesthetic benefit of neither.

I powered down the lifting fans the moment the landing skids touched, with a silent benediction of appreciation to the Omnissiah for the robustness of the little vehicle which had served me so well, waiting for the blades to whisper into silence and the surrounding space to pressurise. After a few moments I noticed the grav-speeder pilots cracking their cockpits, and, reasoning it was safe to disembark, lost no time in doing so myself.

‘Smart work,’ I said, buttonholing the one I took to be the flight commander from the more elaborate rank insignia on her helmet, before turning to shake hands with her wingman as well. ‘I thought I was done for until you saw the blighters off.’ Which hadn’t exactly been true – the Lightnings had got there first. But I knew from long experience that spreading the credit around generally made more of it stick to me, and to be fair I’d been happy enough to see them arrive.

‘Just doing our job, sir.’ The flight commander shrugged, clearly no novice at that game herself, and turned towards the main door leading to the spire’s interior, coming to attention as she did so. This was, of course, large enough to admit cargoes and whatever heavy equipment might be required to attend to the resident vehicles, so Fulcher and his retinue were able to surge through it pretty much en masse – although no one, I noted, came through ahead of the governor himself.

‘Commissar. We meet again.’ Fulcher bowed formally, to which I responded with a nod, which I judged would be an acceptable response in keeping with my exaggerated reputation. ‘My profound apologies for the incivility of your welcome.’

‘Hardly your fault, your excellency,’ I said, noting the more formal manner in which he was conducting himself in front of the overdressed rabble, among which his own gold-and-blue robes stood out like a beacon of modesty and restraint, and pitching my reply accordingly.